


Sex, Drugs, & Uncertainty

by BardicRaven



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Gen, S3E14 'Insensitive', S4-3 '97 Seconds' - Freeform, S4-4 'Guardian Angels' - Freeform, S4E3 '97 Seconds, S4E4 'Guardian Angels', Spoilage for S3-14 'Insensitive' - Freeform, possible spoilage for misc. bits of background trivia; rated PG-13 for heavy thoughts. - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-01
Updated: 2007-12-01
Packaged: 2018-03-25 02:05:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3792532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BardicRaven/pseuds/BardicRaven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>House lives an uncertain life. So it is perhaps not surprising that he has so much uncertainty about life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sex, Drugs, & Uncertainty

##### Greetings!

##### Hard-fought and unbetaed. But brought in on deadline.

##### Thanks go to my ever-patient husband, Mike, who first-reads for me even though he isn't in the fandom. Many thanks also go to my housie, Tookaty, who broke her sacred no-reading-fan-fic rule to help a friend.

##### Prompt is from the current House_fest.

**Prompt:** Special Prompt - Samhain/Beltaine  
**Title:** Sex, Drugs,  & Uncertainty  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Pairing:** Gen  
**Warnings:** Spoilage for S3-14 'Insensitive', S4-3 '97 Seconds', S4-4 'Guardian Angels', possible spoilage for misc. bits of background trivia; rated PG-13 for heavy thoughts.

#####  _House M.D._ and all related characters are the property of Shore Z, Bad Hat Harry, Fox, etc.

##### This particular variation on a theme belonging to others is mine.  
Thank'ee's muchly!  
-Katrina, a.k.a. Birdy

 

# Sex, Drugs, and Uncertainty

_Special Prompt - Samhain/Beltaine_

Hallowe’en always brought out the loons, House mused, feet up on his desk, idly perusing the stack of files in search of their next victim… er, patient.

For example. Ergot-Woman. What was her name? He forced his mind back over the last few weeks. Ah, yes. Irene… something. Well, whatever. Thought she was seeing ghosts when in fact, all she was seeing were the hallucinogenic results of too much mycotoxin on the brain.

Except. 

Except for the tiny, nearly inconsequential fact that what she’d seen had been real.

He’d heard once that this time of the year was the time when the Veil between the worlds was thinnest, when spirits and ghosts could pass more easily between this world and whatever passed for the next. He normally dismissed this as mere New Age twaddle, until something like Irene’s disturbingly accurate description of his dead uncle sent him fleeing from the room, scrambling to keep his worldview intact.

At times like those, he wasn’t sure what he believed. He knew what he wanted to be true, what he was comfortable believing, but his own unswerving devotion to the truth would not let him escape so easily.

He’d known a girl once who’d believed. Lost his virginity to her around the Beltaine fire, in fact, before losing her a year and a half later, honoring her memory as the Samhain fire burned itself to ash.

Hallowe’en had been hard for him since then, a holiday that challenged beliefs and ideas he would have vastly preferred remain sacrosanct.

This year had been no different.

Stark, Almore. One with faith in the afterlife, one with knowledge of it. Both unshakeable in their beliefs, despite House’s best efforts to prove them wrong. 

His own inconclusive journey, born out of equal parts, pique, curiosity, and desperation. He, too, had been gone from this world, thrown over to the other side by the power of the almighty electron. But there had been nothing there. Or had there? Unlike the visions of earlier times, this journey had not been clear.

The ambiguity was driving him crazy.

He needed to know what, if anything, came after this life. The reasons why drew closer with every new day. 

It was a fact. One day he would wake up and see the beginning of the end reflected in the bathroom mirror. His choices had made that an inevitable conclusion.

And one that, truthfully, he wouldn’t necessarily mind. Not the manner of going, which he knew would be ugly, painful and degrading (unless he chose to do something about it earlier), but the simple fact that the long fight would be over. It wasn’t even so much the constant pain that wore on him, as the sheer hopeless repetition of it all. The pain, the pills, the inability to let anyone close, even on those rare occasions when he wanted to, the distractions that were becoming harder and harder to find with each passing day. In some ways, death would come as a relief, regardless of what lay beyond it, nirvana or nothingness. 

Except.

Except that there were obligations here that, try as he might, he could not rid himself of so easily.

Thirteen’s mistake had proven that.

There was still a place in this ‘decision-tree’ oriented world of modern medicine for an older way, one that relied on instinct and intuition as much as on testing and trees. And he was one of only a few who still remembered, and one of even fewer who still taught it. That left an obligation to his profession that in good conscience he could not deny. So. He would teach and he would train for the time he had left, and then when he could no longer do so, he would leave the department to Foreman and never look back. That was all he could do. 

Although he was reluctant to admit it, he knew there were other obligations in his life as well, obligations which would have to be dealt with before he left this world. There were very few people that he had let breach his armor-plating over the years, and fewer still of those had stayed with him after the infarction. With the passage of time, the job and his life had intertwined to the point that by now they were essentially one, which left him with fewer still.

Cuddy… and Wilson.

What to do for them? He knew they knew he lived his life on borrowed time. It was no secret. One look at his file would reveal that harsh reality. The fact that the three of them chose to create the fiction that he did not, changed nothing.

He’d included them in his Will, of course. Not that they needed money, but he’d left them small things to remember him by. He shook his head. Trinkets in a Will. Would that, could that, be enough? But it would have to be, because there was little else he could leave them.

What legacy would they see coming from his death? What part of their friendship with him would they choose to immortalize?

He’d never know the answers of course.

Or… would he?

The ambiguity was driving him crazy. But he suspected he’d find out the answer soon enough.


End file.
